[Tutor] Newbie Question: Define Funcations

[Sean 'Shaleh' Perry]

> 
> The thing is that spam hasn't been defined in the place where you call
> printtwice():
> 
>>>> def printtwice(bruce):
> ...    print bruce, bruce
> ... 
>>>> printtwice(spam)
> Traceback (most recent call last):
>   File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
> NameError: name 'spam' is not defined
>>>> spam = "Hello world" # Now give a value to spam
>>>> printtwice(spam)
> Hello world Hello world
>>>> 
> 
> When you call the function printtwice, the Python interpreter tries to
> find the value of the variable spam to send as an argument to the
> function.  As it hasn't been given a value, there is an error message.
> 

and printtwice('spam') will print the word spam twice.  Note the quotes.  This
makes spam into a string and not a variable name.